Unexpected distractions and random people can find their way into your photos, spoiling the shot. But thanks to a feature called Clean Up in your Mac’s Photos app, you can remove these undesirable elements in a few clicks. Here’s how it works.

What Is Clean Up and Which Macs Support It?

Clean Up is an Apple Intelligence-powered tool available in the Photos app that lets you remove unwanted objects or people from photos with ease.

It does this by automatically analyzing photos and highlighting the items that can be removed. You can then tap the highlighted items, and Clean Up will remove them. Alternatively, it also lets you manually select and remove items from photos.

Clean Up is available on all Mac models powered by Apple’s M1 or later chips and running on macOS Sequoia 15.1 or above. You can also use Clean Up in the Photos app on compatible iPhones and iPads.

How to Use Clean Up in the Photos App on a Mac

Since it’s a part of the Apple Intelligence suite, you need Apple Intelligence enabled on your Mac to use Clean Up in the Photos app.

To verify this, head to System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and ensure the toggle next to “Apple Intelligence” is on.

If you’ve just enabled Apple Intelligence, give it a while to download the necessary files. After this, head to the Photos app. Find the photo from which you want to remove elements and double-click it to open it in full view.

Click the “Edit” button in the top-right corner to access all the editing tools. Go to the “Clean Up” tab. You’ll now see a “Size” slider in the right sidebar. Use it to adjust the size of the brush, which you’ll be using to mark items for deletion.

Now, if Clean Up identifies elements that can be removed, it’ll highlight them in a rainbow hue. Click these elements to remove them.

Alternatively, if you don’t see any suggestions, click, brush, or circle the elements you want to remove from the photo.

If you accidentally select a wrong element, use Edit > Undo Clean Up or hit the Command+Z keyboard shortcut to undo it, then try again.

For precise cleanup, zoom in to photos. You can adjust zoom using the zoom slider at the top, pressing Command-plus(+) or Command-minus(-), or performing a two-finger pinch-in or pinch-out gesture. Be sure to adjust the brush size when you zoom in and out.

Sometimes, Clean Up may leave artifacts after a cleanup or may not be able to clean up an element well. Zoom in and try again using a smaller-sized brush. Or if that doesn’t help, use a brush to try cleaning the botched fill.

When you use Clean Up with people—especially on their faces—there will be times when, instead of deleting it, the tool will add a Safety Filter on top. This Safety Filter is essentially a pixelated mosaic effect to protect people’s identities.

While it isn’t possible to get rid of the Safety Filter every time, it doesn’t hurt to give it a try. Draw a square around the face with the Safety Filter, and Clean Up should remove it. You may see artifacts in some cases.

Alternatively, you can avoid dealing with the Safety Filter in the first place. For this, when selecting a person’s face for deletion, rather than tapping or brushing over it, draw a square or rectangle around it instead.

At any point, if you don’t like the cleanup, you can undo it using Command+Z. Alternatively, to undo the entire cleanup, click the “Reset Clean Up” button in the right sidebar.

Once you’ve removed undesired elements from the photo, you can perform other edits if you need to. Otherwise, click “Done” in the top-right corner to save the photo to your Photos library.

How Effective Is Clean Up at Removing Objects?

I’ve been using the Clean Up tool in Photos on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a while. Here’s a quick summary of my experience.

I’ve found Clean Up to be most effective with two types of photos. First is where the element you want to remove is small, as you can see in the following image. Clean Up managed to delete the watch on my wrist very cleanly in one go and didn’t require a manual clean-up later.

Then, there’s the kind with a clear distinction between the subject and the background. With such photos, you can also remove large elements in many scenarios.

In the image below, you can see how well Clean Up helped me get rid of the plant (in the top-right corner) and the black wall lamp (at the bottom-right). It did leave some artifacts while deleting the event card (on top of the table), but I was able to fix some of them with a few brush strokes.

Another thing to note is that Clean Up couldn’t fix the text “ORGANIC” in the painting behind. This isn’t surprising though, since the tool can only fill in the space left behind with matching texture or color of the surroundings (and not text).

Similarly, Clean Up does a pretty good job of cleaning up when it identifies elements for removal itself, and in most cases, you wouldn’t have to clean up the remnants yourself. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, check out the image below. Clean Up managed to remove the head of the person very cleanly but couldn’t do the same for the wall fan.

When it comes to complex backgrounds, Clean Up struggles and leaves behind a lot of artifacts that are beyond fixable. While using a smaller brush can usually help, it may not yield desirable results in many scenarios, as the photo below demonstrates.

Having used Clean Up a fair bit, I can say it isn’t perfect. However, it greatly simplifies removing undesired elements from photos, which used to be quite a tedious task that involved complex and expensive editing programs. All in all, it’s a nifty tool in most scenarios for most people. Those seeking precision or advanced capabilities should look elsewhere.

Find out what other AI-powered features arrived alongside macOS 15.1. If you don’t use Clean Up, you can turn it and other Apple Intelligence features off.